Liberals have been worked into a lather for the last twenty four hours because after noting that she’s “brilliant,” “dedicated,” and “tough,” President Obama said that California Attorney General Kamala Harris is also the “best-looking attorney general in the country”. As the crowd laughed, Obama said, “It’s true, c’mon.”

This was too much for Jonathan Chait and Joan Walsh. Chait said Obama needed gender sensitivity training and called the president’s comments “disgusting.” Walsh said Obama’s comments made her “stomach turn over.”

Liberals all seem to agree that President Obama has been positive on women’s issues. Writing in Slate, Amanda Marcotte commended the president’s “mostly feminist policy record,” then, in order to turn Obama’s harmless comment into something insidious, cited a study showing the damage “benevolent sexism” does in the workplace.

But this was a performance for a friendly audience, not a boss drooling over a subordinate. Obama likes Harris and Harris likes Obama. They respect each other. They’re friends and allies. The comment was harmless and though he owed her no apology, he’s apparently given her one.

One can only imagine what Chait, Walsh, and Marcotte would do if the president casually stereotyped black people as being good dancers. They’d go nuts, right? ‘Just because the president is an African American does not give him license to resort to ugly stereotypes about black people,’ they’d say. Benevolent racism must be harmful too.

Hey, we’re in luck. During the Democratic primary in 2008, then-Senator Obama was asked whether he agreed with Toni Morrison that Bill Clinton was “our first black president”:

Obama said he would have to “investigate more Bill’s dancing abilities” in order to determine whether he was, in fact “a brotha.” Obama was lauded for giving such a funny, disarming response. Nobody condemned him for it – because he’s black and because it was funny.

So if President Obama was a woman, nobody would’ve minded his comment about Harris? This is a double standard – and a road the guardians of political correctness don’t want to go down.

We talked about the president’s comment on KPFT today. Listen below starting at about the 18:20 mark: